DataMules Blog

You Should Learn Design

Most people don't know how to design. It's an unfortunate truth, yet one that
can be [at least partially] remedied fairly easily. For example, I've already
mentioned The Non-Designers Design Book as an easy way
to get started. It clocks in at a whopping 216 pages, is full of pictures and
big fonts yet reading it has improved my design skills considerably. There are
little things you can do that will make big improvements (e.g., check out our
original product landing page versus the one I've
been working on recently). Don't get me wrong,
I don't think that I am an excellent designer by any means. In fact, it's quite
the opposite, but I am constantly trying to improve my skills by reading up on
design, trying new things, etc.

However, not enough people are learning about design. So let's take a look
as some people could benefit from taking a crash course.

Lawyers

I think lawyers should be required to take a design course. Legal
documents, contracts and anything else that lawyers "draw up" tend to use words
as the only means of communication. Yet time and again, we find that pictures
make things easier to understand (and more precise at the same time!). For
example, I was recently going through some deal documents on a consulting
project where there was a corporate
restructuring. There was
somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 different (but related) entities involved
in the transaction and the only way to figure out who was doing what was to go
through the verbiage in the agreements and draw a picture for myself. Can you
imagine how much easier it would be for everyone involved if a design expert
was utilized in drawing up legal documents? The world would be a
better place.

Finance

I am a finance professional myself, and I can assure you most finance
professionals would benefit from design courses. All too often finance and
accounting professionals think that the only way to communicate is with tables
and numbers. While many do realize that graphs help you understand the data
better, most aren't aware of best practices when it comes to developing such
charts. For example, there is almost always a better way to convey
part-to-whole relationships than the ubiquitous pie
chart, yet
time and again you will find pie charts in finance presentations. In fact,
based on my experience I might even argue that the pie chart is the most
prevalent type of chart in a finance presentation! But there are more
problems then just using a pie chart too often. Other areas like tables could
often be improved by using some sort of contrast (bigger fonts, colors, etc.)
when the readers attention should be focused on a particular part of the
document.

Entrepreneurs and Management

If you are an entrepreneur and have not read up on design, go out and start
learning immediately. As an entrepreneur, you need to sell. You need to sell
to new or existing employees, investors, customers, partners, etc. And in my
opinion, you need to have at least some level of design knowledge in order to
do so. Even if you hire people to build your website, have finance people to
make your presentations to investors, human resources people to do your
hiring you could still benefit from knowing about design. You can help guide
decisions if your employees are building a website or a smartphone app. You
will be able to understand how to improve presentations to investors. You will
be able to make informed decisions in areas that may affect every aspect of
your business. The list goes on.

Programmers

Programmers (almost above all the other professions noted so far) need to know
about design. Designing usable software is difficult. It is hard to
anticipate how people will interact with your brainchild; you may think that
users are going to understand what "message 123" means, when in reality they
won't have a clue. Or you may think that users will simply know to click a
certain area on your website or application, but it will never cross the user's
mind. I do think, however, that most programmers understand the need for
learning about design, so I won't go any further than to suggest some reading
material.

Other

I hope you are starting to see that design principles apply to more than just
designers. If you've gotten this far and are interested in more information,
you may want to check out classics such as The Design of Everyday
Things or The Visual Display of Quantitative
Information. I'd also love to hear your suggestions on
how I can improve my own design skills, so please leave a comment below.